Snakes need love too

After our trail ride yesterday, the two-legged Maggie stuck around to just chill out and try to relax before finals next week.  Kenzie had seen the humans just sitting around the house and had come down to stand in front of the strawberry patch and stare at us.   Glenn couldn’t resist, so he took a handful of grain out for her.  As he was standing there feeding her, he said “MAN!  That’s a big black snake!!  Good thing it’s dead!”

While Glenn is typically a compassionate guy when it comes to animals, he’s also an ophidiophobic.   He didn’t want to see the snake suffer, but he also wasn’t going to get anywhere near the thing.  Oh, and all snakes in his eyes are copperheads.  They’re all dangerous, all venomous, and all of them will slither up his pants leg and bite him the first chance they get.  So it was up to us women to go check on the snake and make sure it was ok.

We found the three foot rat snake alive, but tangled up in a piece of the deer netting that I had used to keep the chickens from tearing up new seedlings in the garden.  The poor thing was punctured from a stick that was also wrapped up in the netting, and the netting itself had sliced him in a few places.  Maggie picked him up and took him to the house while I went to get some antibiotic cream and the camera.

 

 

 

 

 

The snake stayed pretty calm the whole time.  While Maggie was cutting away the netting on his back half, the front half was slithering around in her shirt looking for warmth.

 

 

Once the netting was cut away and the little guy was free, Maggie coated his wounds with Neosporin and took him back to the chicken coop where we found him. 

Lesson learned?  Today I’m going to pull all the deer netting and throw it in the trash.  I’ll use chicken wire instead, which will protect my seedlings, but shouldn’t hurt any local wildlife in the process.

 

As for the trail ride, check out the Training the Unwanted blog for a Gentry update.   I dreamt last night of sitting in a jacuzzi for hours on end – does that give you a hint as to how it went?